Bureau of Programming

The Best and Worst of OSCON 2017

I attended OSCON 2017 in Austin last week. For me, it was a great opportunity to learn more about GraphQL, Rust, graph databases (Neo4j), site reliability engineering, and NGINX’s caching features.

My favorite session was led by David Celis and Garen Torikian:

From REST to GraphQL: Why a query language is perfect for writing APIs
For years, REST has been the standard architecture for APIs. But a new technology is emerging, one that’s perfect for developing rich, client-friendly APIs: GraphQL. David Celis and Garen Torikian explain why this query language is being adopted by companies like Shopify, Pinterest, and GitHub and show you how you can leverage GraphQL for your own APIs.

As O’Reilly begins to upload the slides and videos from the respective talks, I thought it’d be useful to have a reference to which events were rated most highly. After the break is a table with each tutorial and session listed by their attendees’ mean rating, as shown on their respective event pages. (Unrated events are not listed.)

Event Rating
Beginning RxJava 5.00
Finding your way in the dark: Security from first principles 5.00
Enhancing cloud security with the TPM 5.00
It’s all business: How contributing to OSS prepares you for entrepreneurship 5.00
Mapping versus architecture 5.00
Diversity and collaboration 5.00
Meetups We Love: Scaling a local meetup into an international conference 5.00
Passing the baton: Succession planning for FOSS leadership 5.00
The power and responsibility of Unicode adoption 5.00
Personal branding is more than self-promotion 4.88
Ignite OSCON (sponsored by PayPal) 4.86
The frontend dev’s illustrated Rust adventure survival guide 4.86
“Measure all the things” and other memes you haven’t implemented yet 4.80
Step 1: Punch a tree 4.77
Building a real-time recommendation engine with Neo4j 4.75
The life of a large-scale open source project 4.75
HTTP/2 and asynchronous APIs 4.75
Fighting bad guys with data science 4.73
Rebuilding a plane in flight: Refactors under pressure 4.70
Leveraging the mobile device with React Native and Redux 4.67
Intuitive distributed algorithms with F# 4.67
gRPC 101 for Java developers: Building small and efficient microservices 4.67
InfraKit: A toolkit for infrastructure orchestration 4.67
Databases and Docker: A survival guide 4.67
Site reliability engineering 4.62
Playing chess with companies 4.62
Half my life spent in open source 4.59
Using NGINX as an effective and highly available content cache 4.57
Web application security: Browsers fight back 4.57
InnerSource 101 4.50
Security starts with you: Social engineering 4.50
React properly 4.50
Global empire: Building for fun and profit 4.50
MirageOS 3: Smaller, lighter, and more transparent 4.50
Distinguish pop music from heavy metal using Apache Spark MLlib 4.50
Stephen King’s practical advice for tech writers 4.50
Multicloud continuous delivery with Spinnaker: An open source collaboration 4.50
Native apps with web technologies using Electron 4.50
The index as a first-class citizen 4.50
IC to VP: An experience report on becoming a manager 4.50
UI text: Simplicity is difficult 4.50
Open source AI at AWS and Apache MXNet 4.50
Improving the development process with metrics-driven insights 4.50
That’s the sound of hell freezing over: bash and Linux binaries running on Windows 10—How? Why? WHAT? 4.50
Thursday opening welcome 4.50
Deploying and scaling applications in containers with Docker 4.48
Fake it before you make it: Mocking your way to better HTTP APIs 4.43
Speedy React apps: Learn from @WalmartLabs 4.40
Building, nurturing, and managing distributed software teams 4.40
Secure coding practices and automated assessment tools 4.38
From REST to GraphQL: Why a query language is perfect for writing APIs 4.35
Cloud-native Java 4.33
Building containerized microservices with Swift 4.33
Building serverless applications on the Apache OpenWhisk platform 4.33
The serverless revolution for JavaScript developers 4.33
Hands-on with containerized infrastructure services 4.33
Open source and open standards in VR 4.33
Rebuilding trust through blockchains and open source 4.31
Ask more questions 4.31
Can you roll your own virtual assistant? 4.22
Evolutionary architectures 4.21
Building, deploying, and running a scalable and extensible serverless application using AWS 4.20
A journey into feature toggles 4.20
The cultural shift: Success with microservices 4.20
Why people don’t contribute to your open source project 4.20
Wishful thinking 4.20
Speed up your database 300x 4.20
Graph databases will change your freakin’ life 4.20
How I learned to stop being afraid and love the JVM 4.17
The Paved Road at Netflix: At the junction of freedom and responsibility 4.14
How to design games and understand people 4.12
Why choose open infrastructure? (sponsored by IBM) 4.07
Mastering Python decorators 4.00
Building a web app in the Elm ecosystem, (almost) runtime-exception-free guaranteed 4.00
Build your backend in Swift 4.00
Rapid, scalable websites with Elixir and Phoenix 4.00
Building amazing cross-platform command-line apps in Go 4.00
Doubling OpenStack performance with no code changes by optimizing the Python runtime 4.00
How can I contribute? A guide to making your first open source contribution 4.00
Adopting open source in your organization 4.00
Open source 2025: The future of application development 4.00
Building interfaces for virtual and augmented reality 4.00
The ethics of self-driving cars 4.00
A less complex web with Ratchet and Jank 4.00
Workers, queues, and data 4.00
A beginner’s guide to syscalls 4.00
The eventual consistency of succeeding at microservices 4.00
Wednesday opening welcome 4.00
Offline-first apps with Web Components 4.00
Instant and repeatable data platforms 4.00
Clean, analyze, and visualize data with R 4.00
Open source contribution and collaboration: How (and why) Netflix drives industry engagement 3.85
360-degree observability 3.80
Blockchain development fundamentals on Hyperledger fabric 3.75
Making cross-browser testing beautiful 3.75
Multilayered testing 3.75
Contract-first API development using the OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger) 3.67
The open trinity of automation architecture 3.67
Prometheus: The next-generation monitoring system 3.62
A/B testing at scale: Developing an in-house A/B testing framework for big testing and big data 3.60
From WebSockets to WiSH (web in strict HTTP) 3.57
Machine learning with R 3.56
You don’t know bash 3.50
Open source licensing 101 3.50
The next phase of distributed systems with Apache Ignite 3.50
Contributing to Hyperledger 3.50
Monitoring at scale in Salesforce 3.50
Scaling massive, real-time data pipelines with Go 3.50
The people’s code: Learning how to open source the federal government 3.50
To contain or not to contain 3.50
Building a deployment pipeline with Jenkins 2.0 3.38
Be(come) a mentor and help others succeed 3.38
Power Git: Rerere, bisect, subtrees, filter branch, worktrees, submodules, and more 3.33
The art of documentation and README.md 3.33
Kubernetes hands-on 3.28
The power of the open source ecosystem (sponsored by Huawei) 3.25
Fixing the internet with a federated cloud 3.25
Building TensorFlow systems from components 3.17
We the people. . .are open source (sponsored by Amazon Web Services) 3.17
Application security: From zero to hero 3.14
Rust for non-Rust developers 3.00
Hello, cloud: Why and how to start managing your infrastructure with Terraform 2.75
How to motivate technical employees 2.67
Fundamentals of Perl 6: From zero to scripting 2.50
PowerShell: The future of automation on Linux 2.50
From zero to distributed traces: An OpenTracing tutorial 2.50
Sharing America’s code 2.50
Progressive web applications 2.25
How exploring open taxi data from New York City can lead to a new bus route 2.00
Building large-scale web applications with TypeScript 1.67

You can access, download, and run the source code to generate this table (written in Rust) at jacobbudin/oscon-2017-ratings on GitHub.

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